Words in Silence
by Khashana
Summary: When Clint's hearing aids are knocked out by an EMP, Natasha resorts to ASL to communicate. Trouble is, ASL requires facial expressions, and Tony promptly sticks his foot in it. Gen. deaf!Clint.


Clint raced up the stairs of the old building, flung himself through the right door, and crouched by the window. He sighted the target, nocked, drew, and released.

A split second too late.

The scientist pressed down on the button activating the EMP milliseconds before the arrow embedded itself in the machinery and exploded. Tony began to fall from the sky, but he didn't get very far before he powered back on and stabilized.

Clint's hearing aids, though, didn't go back on.

"I'm compromised. Hearing aids are shot. Someone's gonna need to come get me when you need me." The way his voice sounded was familiar, yet jarring. He hated this, hated the way he had to ask for evac from an ordinary building like a civilian, but there was no way he was going to leave his perch when he couldn't hear Steve or Coulson give him the all clear.

A few minutes later, a slight vibration through the floor made him turn. Natasha was standing in the doorway, and her stance made him realize she'd stomped on it so as not to startle him. He grinned despite himself.

I INTERPRET, she signed, and raised her eyebrows and tilted her head forward—the non-manual markers to make it a question.

YES, signed Clint, THANK YOU.

The rest of the op didn't run long. Natasha talked to the team over the coms and communicated with Clint by gentle touches when she needed to tell him something and ASL.

THEY NEED YOU, he signed at one point, deciding halfway through the sentence to add the NMMs for a question. After all, he wasn't on comms, he had no idea if Natasha was needed elsewhere.

THEY NEED YOU, she signed back, question NMMs conspicuously absent and hands emphatic.

YES, he agreed, though it was really more of an "If you say so." By the way Natasha smirked, she knew that.

A moment or two after the situation seemed to be clear, Natasha tapped him on the arm and jerked a thumb over her shoulder. He put his arrow back in the quiver and slung his bow around his body, then got up slowly, stretching. They made their way down the stairs together, and emerged into the open air. Steve came to meet them first, followed quickly by Tony. His lips moved, but not nearly clearly enough for Clint to even attempt speechreading. Natasha responded, and Steve nodded, looking concerned but seeming to accept there wasn't anything he could do.

They made their way back to the Quinjet, picking up Banner and Thor on the way. There was more impossible-to-understand conversation, and Clint even caught a few strains of Tony's voice, which meant he was nearly shouting. Finally, Natasha seemed to calm them, at least a little, and shooed Clint towards the cockpit. Ah. They were wondering if he could fly the plane deaf.

Hell, yes, he could fly the plane deaf, as long as he wasn't trying to have a conversation with HQ in a firefight. Natasha took the copilot's seat and put on the headset, not even bothering to ask about interpreting again. She spoke into it for a few seconds, then gave Clint a thumbs up.

The ride passed in blessed silence. Clint paid attention to the jet's dashboard and the view from the windshield, and Nat's hands didn't so much as twitch. Clint realized she was only going to translate anything unusual that came over the coms and otherwise trust him to fly the plane himself. He felt ridiculously grateful at the way she was letting him prove he wasn't useless without hearing to the rest of the team.

HQ quickly removed any sense of accomplishment. Clint simply hadn't had to navigate it without his hearing in quite a long time, and people kept _talking _to him. Eventually Natasha pulled him into a coffee lounge, which he wasn't expecting, due to trying to pay attention to literally everything else. Luckily, he quelled the automatic 'attack' reaction before he could backhand her (and probably get himself flipped).

COULD BREAK YOUR ARM, he signed, grinning at her to let her know he was teasing.

TRY, was all she signed, also grinning. In retrospect, that was probably a mistake on their parts. The only time Nat ever really smiled that wasn't for cover was during ASL. I CALL P-H-I-L, she added, and the questioning eyebrows were back.

YES THANK YOU, replied Clint.

HE FIX, she responded, and then, STAY with a stern YOU finger and a I-know-you expression, gesturing to the sofa in the break room.

I-UNDERSTAND, said Clint, which he thought was probably more convincing than 'yes' at the moment. But Natasha wasn't looking at him. She was staring over his shoulder, and her face had gone back to its usual blank. Clint turned, but there was no one unusual there, just the Avengers, who had crowded into the doorway of the break room, Tony Stark in front, blocking the door. Clint took a sideways step and turned so he could watch the interaction. Tony was talking, and Clint tried to speechread, since whatever he was saying appeared to have upset Natasha, but to no avail. Tony wasn't enunciating enough, and his beard didn't help, and speechreading is hard, dammit, thought Clint, even when you have excellent eyesight.

Natasha said nothing, at least nothing Clint saw. Tony said some more things. Then Natasha, without warning, ran at Tony, who tried to duck out of the way. Her leg came up to smack into the pressure point on his thigh, and his leg buckled. Her leg followed through and hooked around the far side of his neck, hitting it hard enough that he crashed to the ground. She continued at a sprint through the open door and out of sight.

"The fuck just happened?" he asked out loud, but nobody even tried to answer him. Which, come on. They had phones. They had working fingers with which to type. That gave him an idea. He was still wearing his tac suit, and he didn't keep his cell phone there since he didn't need to talk to anyone that he wasn't already attached to by comlink, but that wouldn't be true of all of them. Bruce, yes—no nonessentials on him, and he was currently bending over Tony anyway—and Nat was gone, but surely Steve, the master of plans, had a backup here.

"Steve. Phone?" He might be slurring a little, but Steve brightened, apparently at being able to be useful, and pulled his cell out from a small pocket on his suit. He unlocked it and handed it to Clint, who texted Coulson. He'd been all set to use the fact he'd memorized the number for just such an emergency, but Coulson was already in Steve's address book.

_Weird shit going down. EMP knocked out my hearing aids. Stark did something and Nat went ballistic, _he wrote. He realized after he sent it that he hadn't signed off, but he rested assured that Coulson would figure out who had sent the text, since Rogers, as far as he was aware, didn't wear hearing aids.

Seconds later, Steve waved to get his attention and pointed at the phone, which Clint realized had a new message.

_BRT._

Coulson entered minutes later, as Tony finally regained enough control over his nervous system to stand up. Phil immediately began speaking in SimCom, signing and speaking at the same time. He asked for a rundown of events since Clint's hearing aids had gone out, and listened while Steve apparently gave it. Then he gave out instructions about next steps specific to each team member. Stark, who had been slammed into a wall and then attacked by Black Widow, should go to medical to confirm no injuries. (He ignored Stark's obvious protests at this.) Steve was to go with him to make sure he stayed out of too much trouble. Bruce and Thor had paperwork, which Steve and Tony would complete after medical. Clint was to come down to R&D with him. Stark said something which Coulson paused to listen to, and then cut off with a sharp,

POLITE INCLUDE EVERYONE CONVERSATION YOU don't-UNDERSTAND, and he was enunciating enough (and Clint knew his speech patterns well enough) that Clint was pretty sure he'd actually said, "It's polite to include as many people as possible in the conversation, Stark, not that you'd understand politeness." SimCom corrupted so much, especially the ASL in Coulson's case, but Clint could have hugged Coulson right then.

Clint grinned at him as Coulson swept him off to R&D. They were very apologetic about the failure of the hearing aids to come back on

NEW IMPLANTS S-T-A-R-K-T-E-C-H, signed Coulson, and Clint stopped him with a laugh, thought for a second, then made a T and turned it into the sign for BEARD. Coulson laughed and repeated the name sign.

S-T-A-R-K-T-E-C-H?, he spelled again, shifting his body to the left, then T-S-T-A-R-K?, shifting to the right. A sign for Starktech, or Tony Stark himself?

BOTH, signed Clint.

Coulson laughed. Not-ROBOT?

It was Clint's turn to laugh.

The R&D staff were comparatively fast about switching out his dead aids for the new StarkTech ones, which, Clint assumed, would reboot in case of an EMP the way the Iron Man armor had.

He didn't stop to ask, though, and Coulson had already gone. So Clint went to the security footage department.

"Does the security footage have sound?" he asked the guy in charge.

"Nope," was his answer.

Hmm.

Clint thought for a bit. His tablet and cell phone were back at Stark Tower, and he didn't particularly want to waste time going all the way home for a chat with JARVIS when Natasha was still here. He wasn't about to ask Tony for help, either. Then he remembered that he still had Steve's phone, presumably left with him on purpose in case he needed to text anyone else. He felt simultaneously grateful and mollycoddled.

"JARVIS, you're installed, right?"

"Indeed I am, Agent Barton, though I am only activated when requested to do so."

"Awesome. Did you by any chance get sound of the conversation going on in this room earlier?"

"Yes, Agent Barton. Sir allows me to record through his phone anything at Headquarters while he is present here due to not being able to easily access the security footage. I can access his phone through the Stark Intranet. Would you like it played?"

"Yes, please."

The recording started out with a few hushed whispers among the team members.

"What's she saying?"

"Anyone know ASL?"

Then, unmistakably Tony, "Whoa." A pause. "Ms. Rushman, your forms said fluent in Latin, but not sign language." Natasha was clearly ignoring him to talk to Clint, because Steve said, "Quiet, Tony," and there was another long pause. Tony, though, was as usual apparently incapable of keeping silent, and he next piped up with, "Man, I had no idea the Black Widow did facial expressions. Did anyone else see that? She pretended to be my PA for a while and she never did expressions like that. She definitely never smiled. Am I the only one who wonders why only Clint gets smiles? And only when he can't hear her? Is that weird to anyone else? Is that some deafness kink I don't know about? Hey, look, I get this blank expression, is everyone seeing the difference here? Hey, wait—" And then the unmistakable sounds of Natasha's foot connecting with Tony's leg.

"That's enough, thanks, JARVIS," said Clint, and went to find Tony. He found Steve babysitting him through his paperwork in an empty conference room.

"Oh, hey, Clint. They get you fixed up?" asked Steve.

"Yep," Clint answered shortly.

"Legolas, you wanna explain why Miss Spider went all Karate Kid on my neck? That still feels weird," complained Stark.

"Nat's not fluent in ASL," Clint started, figuring it made the most sense to begin at the beginning of the conversation. "She only knows enough to carry out a basic sitrep. And guess what, even if you are fluent, a huge amount of ASL is body language and facial expression." He flashed briefly on his conversation with Phil. "The word 'or' is often a shift in stance. 'Not' is a headshake. Questions and tone of voice are done with facial expressions."

"I know Natasha was trained as an assassin really young," interjected Steve, and yes, he was starting to get the idea.

"Emotions are death," said Clint flatly. "When you grow up like Natasha did, having emotions is a problem, and showing them is five times worse. She learned to manufacture emotional expression to get what she wants, but as you noticed, Stark, she never does it when she doesn't have to. All her covers are reticent if she can possibly help it."

"But she does it to talk to you, to make sure you understand," Steve finished for him.

"Exactly," said Clint, folding his arms. "Because a smile tells me she's teasing when I have no other way of telling. Because raised eyebrows makes a statement into a question."

"You can't tell she's teasing even when she's talking," pointed out Stark.

"She doesn't put inflection into her voice, no," said Clint, "but you think I'm doing so hot with using contextual clues to figure it out when I've suddenly had one of my senses ripped away and she's communicating in broken ASL? She did it to make me feel as safe as I could, to not make me scramble to figure out my best friend on top of everything else I suddenly can't understand."

He hadn't really meant to say all that, to reveal that much, but he could see acceptance in Tony's eyes, and figured he could afford this vulnerability, especially when Tasha had given so much of it for him today.

"You threw that in her face," he added as a parting shot, because it was Tony's fault he was now going to have to sit with Tasha until she came out of hiding and work twice as hard to read her all the time until she calmed down a little again.

Whatever. He'd do it, for her.

He left Tony and Steve, confident that Natasha would receive a giant fruit basket or something else equally ridiculous by the next day, and found her exactly where he expected, but no one else, except maybe Phil, ever would. Phil, though, would know they were hiding, and he would understand why, and he'd cover for them until Natasha felt safe to come out again.

"I got my ears back, and Tony's an ass," was all he said as he climbed up to sit with her. She made no indication that she heard him, but he knew she had. That one sentence meant everything she needed to hear. _You don't have to smile for me anymore. Thank you for doing it earlier. I'll be okay. Phil knows. I know what Tony said. I told him off. I'm here for you, for as long as you need._

And he sat there with her in silence.

* * *

Disclaimer:

I researched ASL and Deaf culture for this story, but doing the research made me ever more aware just how little I actually know. If I have made any mistakes, even little ones, please let me know, I promise I won't be mad, I'm a serious perfectionist. For example, I'm not sure if R&D would just need to disconnect something they can easily reach or if they'd actually need to do surgery, since I don't know whether an EMP affects batteries or entire circuits. So I left it really vague and only said they were quicker than Clint expected.

That said, I have some canon and headcanon that affect this story: Clint doesn't already have name signs for Phil or anyone else because he lost his hearing while already an adult and was promptly fitted for implants. ('Phil' and 'Nat' are pretty short anyway.) He, Phil, and Natasha learned ASL around this time because they realized how necessary it would be in a case such as today, and they're still in decent practice because Nat and Clint sometimes use it to communicate when they don't want to be overheard/understood, because anything Phil does, he likes to do well, and because Clint doesn't always have his hearing aids in. Clint is not part of Deaf culture, and he does consider it to be a disability, which is due to never having experienced anything else.


End file.
